The role of skin painting in predicting lung cancer

The mouse skin cancer model provides an important system for studying mechanisms involved in the various stages of carcinogenesis and for bioassaying tobacco smoke constituents and additives for carcinogenic/cocarcinogenic and tumor-promoting properties as well as for identifying compounds that may inhibit tumor formation and malignant conversion. In addition, it is an excellent model for studying the formation of precancerous lesions as well as squamous cell carcinomas. It relates very well to other squamous cell carcinoma models and contributes to better understanding of the human epithelial cancers including lung cancer. The SENCAR mouse is an established model system demonstrated to be more sensitive than the B6C3F1 or Swiss CD-1 strains in the initiation/promotion skin-painting test method. Although the relationship between mouse skin tumors and any manifestation of the toxicity of tobacco smoke and other complex environmental mixtures in humans is unknown, the skin-painting model is the only assay that provides a practical method of obtaining a tumorigenic end point with cigarette smoke condensates and other complex mixtures. This assay provides a rapid response with relative ease of quantification of various parameters of tumorigenic response including tumor incidence, latency, multiplicity, and malignancy.